Scriptures Everywhere

This was the third and final session of the Spring 2026 season for the Institute for Signifying Scriptures' podcast, Scriptures Everywhere. We concluded our conversation about Cruelty as Citizenship by Cristina Beltrán. The participants reflected on why Latina/o/e/x people both complicate and reinforce whiteness in U.S. democracy and considered the historical context of racial categorization in both Latin America and the United States. The participants concluded by discussing how scriptural politics and interpretation are used to maintain power structures, by turning to arguments around birthright citizenship where the Trump administration demonstrates an approach to scriptural authority that is not strictly textual.

In this episode, we move from Stephen Best's None Like Us (2018) to a kind of flip side of diasporic belonging, the violent practices that constitute citizenship. We focus our discussion on Cristina Beltrán's Cruelty as Citizenship (2020) as we consider how the pleasures of cruelty are scripturalizing practices, and scriptures are that "something significant," that sanctified border, that binds citizenship together through exclusion.

In this first episode of our spring 2026 season, we speak live from the Institute for Signifying Scriptures Annual Meeting in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. We discuss the introduction to Stephen Best's None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Duke, 2018) with a focus on how scriptures make diasporas and what it takes to demystify and "decode" the scriptural traditions of social life. Special thanks to Richard Newton, University of Alabama Department of Religious Studies, for organizing this annual meeting and conversation. 

In our final episode of the fall 2025 season, we discuss the role of memory, of how and why we try to forge a sacred past and communal memory, how gender matters to the dynamics of Barracoon as a site of memory, and what it might mean to find messier ground. We look ahead to our meeting in person in Alabama in February 5-7, 2026.

In this episode, we discuss different forms of knowing and understanding, and how Hurston makes Kossula into scripture even as his stories depict for us strategies for navigating distinct, and sometimes conflicting, scriptural worlds. We particularly examine the language of understanding, and the photograph of him at the end of Hurston's narrative about Kossula. 

In this second conversation about scriptures, memory, and Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon, we discuss the title of the book and what it tells us about the politics and emphases of scripturalizing practices. We also consider facets of Hurston's and Kossula's language that point us towards practices, ways, and forms of knowing and not knowing.

In this first episode of our fall 2025 season on memory, we gathered to discuss Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo", which was written almost 100 years ago but only published in 2018. We consider how its recent publication represents a form of scripturalizing alongside how Hurston's own work seeks to make a person into scripture. 

In this conversation, first recorded in the fall of 2023, Dr. Arthur Carter, Dr. Rachel Beckley aka Rachel Schwaller, and Dr. Richard Newton discuss how the Institute for Signifying Scriptures currently works as a site of intellectual marronage. What does marronage mean for intellectual life? What is to be gained by the Signifying (on) Scriptures project?

In this conversation, first recorded in the fall of 2023, Dr. Lalruatkima, Dr. Robin Owens, and Dr. Katrina Van Heest discuss the early years of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures in the 2000s. What is the ISS? What were the questions about scriptures that were examined in its first decade?

In this conversation, first recorded in the fall of 2023, Dr. Tat-siong Benny Liew speaks with Dr. Grey Gundaker and Dr. Velma Love about the African Americans and the Bible conference after 25 years. Why did this conference matter in 1999? What are its legacies for the study of the Bible, scriptures, and African American communities?

Recorded in 2023, our inaugural episode comes from HTI's Open Plaza Talks podcast. Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, professor of theology and religious studies at the University of San Diego, talks to fellow scholar Vincent L. Wimbush, Founding Director of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS), which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2024. This episode was originally released to celebrate the annual conference in Atlanta—April 11-13, 2024 under the theme of "Marronage"—and to mark the 25th anniversary of the initial conference that inspired the founding of ISS, along with the publication of African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures (Continuum, 2000; reprinted with Wipf and Stock in 2012). Edited by Dr. Wimbush, the anthology brought together 68 scholars and experts from a range of disciplines, including: ethnography, cultural history, and biblical studies, as well as art, music, film, dance, drama, and literature. Today, ISS is an independent organization composed of members of varied backgrounds—scholars, researchers, teachers, public intellectuals, artists, community leaders, and social activists—"who are committed to constructing and advancing a new mode of critical inquiry into social–discursive formation." Here, the term 'scriptures' is "used provocatively as shorthand for an illuminating analytical wedge for cross-cultural, disciplinarily-transgressive excavation of and conversation about the politics of meaning."